Tracing an Activist Through Decades

Plumbing the achievements of a 98-year-old activist, “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs” also grapples with the daunting challenge of political awareness. The director Grace Lee, who met her subject while making a movie about people who share her name (“The Grace Lee Project”), shadows this variable exploration of identity and engagement with an acknowledgment of generational shifts in sensibility, including her own perspective.

Born bourgeois, the charismatic Ms. Boggs grew interested in Marxism and social justice through her university studies and exposure to African-American struggles in Chicago. After marrying the Southern-born activist Jimmy Boggs, she aligned herself with the civil rights movement, the rare Chinese-American among her black colleagues. Then, as a longtime Detroit resident, she advocated generally for civic self-awareness and political change.

Ms. Boggs’s path helps trace the vicissitudes of leftist activism after the 1960s, from a time of violent resistance to a seemingly insular period, when she conducted discussion groups in Maine. Throughout, Ms. Lee, 45, can’t always wrap her mind around the serenely formidable Ms. Boggs, and she says as much. The documentary partly expresses the gaps between the ambitions and interests of Ms. Boggs and those of her younger chronicler, born to an age of identity politics.

Ms. Lee could have delved more deeply into Ms. Boggs’s thoughts, and slips into glib autopilot by using archival footage with sound effects or repeating ideas of personal transformation. But in sharing her subject’s life achievements, she raises meaningful questions and keeps them profitably open.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C14 of the New York edition with the headline: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe